The ramblings of a software development consultant

Comparing files

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As a newcomer to Visual Studio 2008 I am not impressed by the file comparison tools used by default in the IDE (a part of Team Foundation Server, I think). I have always reverted to WinMerge as my tool of choice for comparing text files. Today I came across a great little utility named Visual Studio Comparison Tools that lets me use WinMerge directly from Visual Studio. Well… not directly – but it starts WinMerge as an external tool and supplies the selected IDE files as arguments. The screenshot shows the tool in action from the IDE’s solution explorer.

You need to have WinMerge installed in the default location (C:\Program Files\WinMerge) for it to work.